Ellen Woodsworth is the founder of Women Transforming Cities International Society. She works to make cities work for self-identified women and girls all over the world from local neighbourhoods to global gatherings like UN Habitat 3. She thinks that women and girls work for cities but cities don’t work for women and girls. She believes cities must put a gendered intersectional lens and use disaggregated data on policies, programmes, budgets, funding, staffing and governance in order to create women-friendly cities. 

Ellen is an international speaker and urban consultant on gender and intersectional planning. She is a former Vancouver City Councillor and was their representative on the Executive of Union of B.C. Municipalities and the Lower Mainland Treaty Advisory Committee. Ellen provides workshops for cities and NGO’s using “Advancing Equity and Inclusion a Guide for Municipalities”. She spoke at the UN Habitat 3 conferences in Prague and in Quito and at the Smart Sustainable Cities conference in Montevideo, Uruguay as well as participating in the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights meeting about the “Right to the City” and housing. She also spoke at WUF 9 in Kuala Lumpur and moderated the Women Transforming Cities launch of the Women Friendly Cities Challenge an online library of wise practices tied to the SDG’s, CEDAW and NUA. She spoke at WUF 10 on LGTBQI2S issues in Abu Dhabi and been a consultant to UN Habitat on LGTBQi2S issues. She gives talks on how to put a gendered intersectional lens on everything from climate change, housing, transit, electoral reform and COVID-19. 

We closed 2022 with a farewell to our founder and longtime leader and guide, Ellen Woodsworth. Ellen has retired from WTC after 18 years of tirelessly advocating for better cities for women and girls. Please enjoy this retrospective of Ellen’s work with WTC below. We wish her all the very best in her continued global advocacy work.